The history of the Institute of Medical Ethics has been well recorded. Accounts of its origins in the London Medical Group were published in an academic paper of 2003,1 in the transcript of a Wellcome Witnesses to Twentieth Century Medicine Seminar in 20072 and in a chapter of the 2009 Cambridge World History of Medical Ethics.3 In 2013, 50 years since the inauguration of its first series of lectures and symposia, the LMG as an organisation no longer exists, but its (...) aspirations and achievements are alive and well, both in the Journal of Medical Ethics and in the IME, now exploring a new phase as a membership organisation. Other papers in this issue will discuss the history and prospects of the Journal and Institute. But the LMG, similar medical groups in all other British medical schools and the Society for the Study of Medical Ethics from which the IME derived also have a significant continuing life in the thinking and practice of many medical and healthcare professionals who participated in their activities, and then in turn on those influenced by their thinking and practice. The LMG, it could be said, is ‘no more’ an organisation ‘Now but a whole climate of opinion’.4A bottom-up evolutionThe first medical students to be involved in the LMG may not have foreseen its influence on their future careers, but many were aware of being part of something new and exciting. One of those with whom the first lecture series was planned was Margaret Lloyd . "The beginning of the LMG in 1963 was an exciting time for medical students in London. As a mature student entering St Mary's Hospital Medical School … ". (shrink)

An innovative theory of consciousness, drawing on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and supported by brain-imaging, presented in the form of a hardboiled ..

This case study examines five dimensions of the 2007–2009 financial crisis in the United States: the devastating effects of the financial crisis on the U.S. economy, including unparalleled unemployment, massive declines in gross domestic product, and the prolonged mortgage foreclosure crisis; the multiple causes of the financial crisis and panic, such as the housing and bond bubbles, excessive leverage, lax financial regulation, disgraceful banking practices, and abysmal rating agency performance; the extraordinary efforts of the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve Bank (...) of New York, and the Department of the Treasury to stem the financial freefall triggered by the crisis and resuscitate financial institutions, the ethical implications of the unprecedented actions by government institutions to rescue financial institutions and drag the country back from the brink of global financial collapse, and the conduct of the various parties contributing to the financial crisis, such as the shoddy behavior of mortgage brokers, the massive securitization of mortgages into overly complex bonds, the excessive leverage of financial institutions, the disgraceful work of bond rating firms, the abysmal risk management systems employed by financial institutions, and the massive operations of the shadow banking and over-the-counter derivatives markets; and the major provisions of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act signed into law to in response to the financial crisis and for the purpose of correcting the egregious conduct of major financial institutions. (shrink)

This case describes a recent iteration of the Ponzi scheme originated in 1920 by Charles Ponzi: creating a plausible investment, attracting investors, using the money from more recent investors to pay off earlier investors, and earning a substantial profit, estimated to be $15 million (worth $220 million today).1 While not as big as Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, as a result of which he was sentenced to 150 years in prison and ordered to pay restitution of $170 billion to his victims,2 (...) the Federal district court in Miami was asked to order Par Funding’s cofounders, Joseph W. LaForte and his wife, Lisa McElhone, to pay $337 million to Par Funding investors and to declare they engaged in a Ponzi scheme in defrauding those investors.3 Ultimately the Federal district court in Miami ordered Par cofounders to pay “$219 million in ‘ill-gotten gains,’ fines and interest so the funds can be used to help reimburse 1,200 investors who were duped into buying the risky, unregistered securities used to finance the high-fee loan company.”4 How LaForte and McElhone executed their scheme is an intriguing story which provides helpful insight into ethical and U.S. securities law principles. (shrink)

Among contemporary religious believers, some follow in the footsteps of Newton, allowing their religious understanding to fill in gaps left by the sciences. Others take a more Wittgensteinian approach, discretely separating religious from scientific ways of thinking. Because neither of these relatively irenic positions captures the important element of cultural reform that is prevalent in so much of the religious life of the past, George Lakoff's recent work in cognitive studies is used to suggest ways that religious ideas may be (...) used to challenge and enrich scientific thought. A scrutiny of Richard Dawkins's biological analyses of human behavior reveals the distorting limitations of exclusively scientific understanding, thereby clearing conceptual space for genuinely religious values, actions, responsibilities, and forms of human life. (shrink)

Drawing on philosophy, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, Simple Minds explores the construction of the mind from the matter of the brain.

Three of the most venerable objections to anthropomorphic conceptions of the divine are traceable to Xenophanes and his critique of the early Greek gods. Though suitably revised, these ancient criticisms have persisted over the centuries, plaguing various religious communities, particularly those of classical Christian commitment. Xenophanes complained that anthropomorphism leads to unseemly characterizations, noting that both over the ages, the list of unseemly characteristics has expanded somewhat.

Contrary to Hume’s contention, there is no essential connection between miracles and violations of natural laws. Not only may violations of natural law be utterly nonmiraculous, miracles may occur in complete conformity with such laws. Furthermore, a proper understanding of miracles in terms of divine agency places them into an epistemic context where the growth of science does not directly threaten their possibility.

Scientists, both modern and contemporary, commonly try to discern patterns in nature. They also frequently use arguments by analogy to construct an understanding of the natural mechanisms responsible for producing such patterns. For Robert Boyle, the famous clock at Strasbourg provided a perfect paradigm for understanding the connection between these two scientific activities. Unfortunately, it also posed a serious threat to his realistic pretensions. All sorts of internal mechanisms could produce precisely the same movements across the face of a clock. (...) Given God's immense creative capacities, Boyle realized that standard epistemological constraints could never ensure, not even to the least degree of probability, that scientific theories about the unobservable mechanisms of nature were descriptively accurate. Like most moderns, he fortified his epistemology theologically in order to retain his realistic stance. John Locke, however, took counsel from Ecclesiastes to repudiate Boyle's realism, while Samuel Clarke mobilized biblical images to dismiss the clockwork paradigm altogether.A contemporary review of this modern controversy reveals that there is still much to learn from the clock at Strasbourg. Among other things, the realism/antirealism issue is of central importance to understanding today's science, Nancey Murphy's protests notwithstanding. Moreover, the kind of realistic stance that is essential, not only to the truth but to the very intelligibility of certain types of scientific explanation, demands more than the critical realism of Ian Barbour. To be taken seriously, the models used in such contexts must be taken literally. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Towards a Design-Based Analysis of Emotional Episodes”Dan Lloyd (bio)To think about grief is to think about many things. My one-year-old daughter was practicing opening and closing a cabinet door as I puzzled over a response to Wright, Sloman, and Beaudoin’s “Toward a Design-Based Analysis of Emotional Episodes.” She was completely absorbed in her project, and as I watched my elf at her task, I thought about (...) the voices of loss that speak briefly in section 3.1. How terrible it would be to lose a loved one. With that, I was overcome with a pang of love for my daughter, and further thought about the paper ceased.In the authors’ terms, my feelings about my daughter were “perturbances,” states that interfered with the internal management of my thought process, derailing it from the deliberate project of responding to the paper. Reading and thinking about loss activated the attachment structures involving those whose loss would be most devastating to me. The activation of the attachment structure was my episode of intense feeling, arising in me with an insistence level that temporarily exceeded my academic pursuits. The whole sequence of mental events arose through the interaction of major processes of perception, beliefs, “motivators,” plans, self-monitoring, and global control. The mind, according to the authors, is a collection of such processes.Is that all there is? The familiar objection to this brand of functionalist analysis is that it leaves out the most important part of mind, namely, conscious experience. Such an “architecture” for an “intelligent agent” is at best a simulation of some aspects of cognition, but the feelings, the moods, the subjective what-it-is-like of experience are missing. And without them, say the familiar critics, the mind is missing. The authors are naturally aware of this objection, and are careful to hedge their project: “In our discussion the ‘phenomenological problem’ is factored out and placed to one side.”I wonder, however, whether the authors are too quick to concede that their model omits the phenomenal. The symptoms of grief expressed by its sufferers would all be considered reports of the experience of grief, aspects of its phenomenology. The authors use these reports to guide their analysis of the functional processes of grief, and their analysis in turn explains why the grievers experience their losses as they do. Functionalist psychologists usually base their analyses on strictly observable responses obtained in cognitive psychology experiments. In using first-person reports as their guide, the authors inaugurate a promising union of phenomenology and functionalism. After their treatment of grief, the left over and left out phenomenology is noticeably slimmer.What remains of grief is its pain. In the spirit [End Page 127] of the paper, I will close with a brief speculative extension of the authors’ approach, using it to examine the core of the experience of grief. Like physical pain, emotional pain is curiously resistant to description, and not even easy to remember. (One remembers that one was in pain, and that it was hateful, but such reminiscences are faint shadows of the experience itself.) Though its phenomenology is elusive, pain has a clear function. It is aversive. As the authors note, pain involves “dispositions to terminate or reduce some state or process.” In their terms, pain is a motivator with a very high insistence level. Motivators motivate plans, and an aversive motivator would principally motivate a plan to remove the cause of the pain. However, grief and other chronic emotional pains are marked by irremediability. There can be no plan that replaces the loss, only fantasy plans or reversions to infant strategies of last resort (like crying). Within the cognitive architecture proposed by this paper, emotional pain is thus characterized by a collision of two processes, a highly insistent motive meeting a vacuum where a plan should be. The unanswered insistence would make the collision hateful, while the absent plan would leave a state partly without intentional content, and thus hard to describe or remember. This breakdown, arguably, is the pain—an emergent state or states arising in just this sort of wrenching bind.The traditional critic will insist that the painfulness... (shrink)

It is commonly thought that w v quine's indeterminacy thesis can be devastatingly undercut by a straightforward survey of the details of one's own linguistic capabilities. However, Because any such survey must depend upon a repudiation of the quinean doctrines used to generate his thesis, Objections based upon introspective evidence remain question begging without a critique of those more central doctrines. Since such a critique would be sufficient in itself to undermine quine's thesis, Objections based upon introspective gleanings must be (...) abandoned as either question begging or superfluous. (shrink)

In his recent review of the Galileo affair, Pope John Paul II confidently proclaimed the intellectual autonomy of religion, comfortably affirming that the methods and ideas of religion are cleanly separable from those of the sciences. Unfortunately, a close review of the actual details of the Galilean controversy reveals that the lesson to be learned from that famous case is not one of sanitary intellectual compartmentalization, but one of entangling interdependencies among scientific, religious, and philosophical thought.

According to Langdon Gilkey, both religion and science are cognitive enterprises, but they are separated methodologically. As a result, science and religion are concerned with different, though related levels of truth. Against these claims, historical examples are used to argue that scientific and religious explanations cannot be so neatly separated. To the contrary, both fields frequently treat overlapping ranges of data in methodologically opportunistic ways.

Michael Ruse, Science and spirituality: making room for faith in the age of science Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11153-010-9242-9 Authors Edward L. Schoen, Western Kentucky University Department of Philosophy and Religion Bowling Green KY USA Journal International Journal for Philosophy of Religion Online ISSN 1572-8684 Print ISSN 0020-7047.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Searle and the ‘Deep Unconscious’”Dan Lloyd (bio)Can another person know my thoughts with better authority than I know them myself? With his affirmative answer to this question, Freud invented the twentieth-century human, a being whose mind is accessible to scrutiny from outside, and whose attempts at conscious self-explanation are at best partial and in many cases wrong. Even as Freud’s scientific influence wanes, the shift of (...) authority he inaugurated is still gathering strength. Now the mind is open to many outsiders. Not only psychoanalysts, but behaviorists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists are all striving to read my mind, and yours. Against this historical sea change stands the solitary John Searle, whose work is consistently animated by fierce adherence to first person authority and surly attacks of any theory that could be exploited to undermine that authority. To most readers Searle’s positions seem stubbornly anti-scientific and covertly dualistic, despite his insistence to the contrary. And since science is good and dualism is bad, Searle’s arguments have become standing obstacles for theorists to discuss, debate, or dismiss.Buttressing his insistence on first person authority, Searle defends a Cartesian view of mental representation or intentionality, holding that an intentional entity is a conscious entity, either in actuality or potentiality. Deeply unconscious representations are therefore impossible. Eric Gillett has joined the debate just here with a pointed critique of Searle’s argument (also discussed in Lloyd 1990). Gillett performs a double service by challenging Searle’s premises and offering some positive grounds for the deep unconscious. I agree with Gillett that establishing the existence of deeply unconscious representations requires a theory of intentionality that is independent of conscious awareness. Ruth Millikan’s evolutionary teleology is an excellent candidate, in its pursuit of real function and real content (vs. “as-if” interpretation) for mental items.Some questions remain. First, if deeply unconscious entities are clinically important, then in addition to a defense-in-principle of their existence we will need some method of identifying specific deep representations in particular cases. Millikan’s functionalism links content to broad biological and environmental contexts, and thereby seems to be an unwieldy tool for content ascription. If deeply unconscious representations get their content in the way Millikan describes, how can the clinician make use of them?Second, and more important, Millikan’s theory shares with many others the ambition to explain all intentional entities, conscious and unconscious alike. This leads to a new dualism of mental contents, a split between intentional content and conscious content, since the comprehensive theory of intentionality will assign mental content both [End Page 201] shallow and deep, irrespective of consciousness. This is a perplexity that transcends particular theories of intentionality, since what my mental states represent seems at least partly dependent on my environment or context, but my current state of consciousness is exclusively dependent on my brain. How, in theory, can these two concepts of content be reconciled?In sum, deeply unconscious representations do not come cheap. One way to escape the new dualism of content is to deny that the deep entities are representations. Instead, they might be dispositions or the “mechanisms, instinctual drives, structures, and energies which can never become conscious under any conditions,” as Gillett suggests. (In Lloyd 1994 I explore the possibility of a dispositional unconscious understood via connectionism.) On this view, mental content could remain within our first person authority, while the causal processes that manage that content remain out of sight. I wouldn’t have to guess what I’m thinking, but I would depend on the sciences of the mind to tell me how I come to think it.Related ArticlesFeature Article: Searle and the "Deep Unconscious"Commentary: Commentary by LloydDan Lloyd Dan Lloyd, Department of Philosophy, Trinity College, Hartford, CT 06106, U.S.A.ReferencesLloyd, D. 1990. Loose connections: Four problems with Searle’s argument for the ‘Connection Principle.’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13: 615–16. Google ScholarLloyd, D. 1994. Connectionist hysteria: Reducing a Freudian case study to a network model. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 1, no. 2: 69–88. Google ScholarCopyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

While reports of sensory encounters with the divine come from a variety of religious traditions, philosophers as diverse as Thomas Aquinas and Robert Oakes have argued that such experiences of incorporeal divine beings are impossible. Nevertheless, by clarifying various relations among acts of perception, perceptual detections of presence and kinds of perceptual recognition, the sensory perception of imperceptible things emerges as a coherent possibility. So, even if they are essentially unobservable, incorporeal divine beings still fall well within the range of (...) normal human sense perception. (shrink)

This case describes the background of the whistleblower complaint, filed by Daniel Schlicksup, questioning the propriety of Caterpillar Inc.’s “Swiss tax strategy”. The Swiss tax strategy was recommended by its independent auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and designed to transfer to a Swiss entity the profits earned on its sales of “purchased finished replacement parts” to foreign marketers. This strategy enabled Caterpillar to shift $8 billion in replacement parts sales to Switzerland and to avoid or defer paying U.S. taxes on that income. Daniel (...) Schlicksup, a member of Caterpillar’s tax staff, filed an Internal Revenue Service whistleblower complaint against Caterpillar and provided the IRS extensive documentation that served as the foundation for the IRS’s claim Caterpillar owed $2 billion in back taxes and penalties, potentially entitling Schlicksup to a huge whistleblower award ranging from $300 to $600 million. Careful review of this case facilitates student discussion, and enhances student understanding, of the wisdom and morality of Schlicksup’s whistleblowing activities. (shrink)

Soma‐to‐germline feedback is forbidden under the neo‐Darwinian paradigm. Nevertheless, there is a growing realization it occurs frequently in immunoglobulin (Ig) variable (V) region genes. This is a surprising development. It arises from a most unlikely source in light of the exposure of co‐author EJS to the haplotype data of RL Dawkins and others on the polymorphism of the Major Histocompatibility Complex, which is generally assumed to be the most polymorphic region in the genome (spanning ∼4 Mb). The comparison between the (...) magnitude of MHC polymorphism with estimates for the human heavy chain immunoglobulin V locus (spanning ∼1 Mb), suggests IGHV could be many orders of magnitude more polymorphic than the MHC. This conclusion needs airing in the literature as it implies generational churn and soma‐to‐germline gene feedback. Pedigree‐based experimental strategies to resolve the IGHV issue are outlined. (shrink)